Child Crimes

Jess McAdams dotes on her four children and gives advice and suggestions to parents all around the world. No one would ever question her love and devotion to her children, let alone suspect her of murdering one. But Alex Mercer does. Alex has plenty of experience investigating crimes involving missing kids. So when he senses something is wrong, he trusts his instincts. The only problem is, he's a newly deputized officer of the law. If he's wrong about Jess, he'll destroy his career before it gets off the ground.

Through the eyes of a distinctly non-athletic protagonist - a fat high school journalist named Mitch - veteran sports novelist Deuker reveals the surprising truth behind a mysterious football player named Angel. When Angel shows up at Lincoln High, he seems to have no past - or at least not one he is willing to discuss. Though Mitch gets a glimpse of Angel's incredible talent off the field, Angel rarely allows himself to shine on the field. Is he an undercover cop, wonders Mitch? Or an ineligible player? In pursuit of a killer story, Mitch decides to find out just who this player is.

Can murder ever be justified? When a prominent judge is found stabbed to death on Valentine's weekend in what appears to be a crime of passion, homicide detective Maggie Novak knows her skills are about to be put on trial. Bobby Russell is everybody's favorite judge, and at first Maggie is hard-pressed to find anyone with anything bad to say about him, let alone someone harboring a hatred so deep that they will kill him over it.

When Natalie Benyon’s 18-month-old daughter, Ella, disappears from a housing estate, the police and local community act quickly to organise a search. Given the age of the child, once the local area is scoured, DI Winter Meadows draws the frightening conclusion that Ella has been abducted. The attention of the police focuses on the family itself: the lifestyle of the mother, the boyfriend, the raucous party they had the night before Ella’s disappearance.

Alex Sawyer has escaped his underground nightmare to discover the whole world has become a prison, and Alfred Furnace is its master. Monsters rule the streets, leaving nothing but murder in their wake. Those who do not die become slaves to Furnace's reign of cruelty. Alex is a monster too. He is the only one who can stop Furnace but in doing so he could destroy everything. Is he the executed or the executioner? Who will die? All Alex knows is that one way or another, it all ends now.

Human traffickers earn up to 35 billion dollars a year. They are ruthless and give no thought whatsoever to the victims and what happens to them. They take them, buy them, then sell them to anybody. Eighty percent of the trafficked are sold into the sex trade and the biggest demand is for the children. Taken away from their families, these children are drugged, tortured, then repeatedly raped. They have nowhere to run to, are unable to fight back, and their average age is 11. Their life expectancy once they are taken, is seven years.

Robert Stern, a successful defence lawyer, doesn't know what lies in store for him when he agrees to meet a new client in a derelict estate on the outskirts of Berlin. To his astonishment, the defendant is a 10-year-old boy - Simon, a fragile child with a chronic illness who insists that he was a murderer in a former life.

A great recurring character in a series you love becomes an old friend. You learn about their strange quirks and their haunted pasts and root for them every time they face danger. But where do some of the most fascinating sleuths in the mystery and thriller world really come from? What was the real-life location that inspired Michael Connelly to make Harry Bosch a Vietnam vet tunnel rat? Why is Lee Child's Jack Reacher a drifter?

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parents' persecution by the Nazis.

This audiobook tells 7 horrific true crime stories of parricide, the killing of one's parent(s). In this thought provoking, thrilling true crime piece, you will get an insight and understanding of this topic that most people will never receive or thankfully, never experience.

Sydney's dad is the only psychiatrist for miles around their small Ohio town. He is also unexpectedly dead. Is Sydney crazy, or is it kind of weird that her dad - a guy whose entire job revolved around other peoples' secrets - crashed alone, with no explanation? And why is June Copeland, homecoming queen and the town's golden child, at his funeral? As the two teenagers grow closer in the wake of the accident, it's clear that not everyone is happy about their new friendship. But what is picture-perfect June still hiding? And does Sydney even want to know?

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong have returned to Deepdean for a new school term, but nothing is the same. There's a new Head Girl, Elizabeth Hurst, and a team of Prefects - and these bullying Big Girls are certainly not good eggs. Then, after the fireworks display on Bonfire Night, Elizabeth is found - murdered. Many girls at Deepdean had reason to hate Elizabeth, but who might have committed such foul play?

On a cold morning a cyclist finds the brutally-slaughtered body of a woman in her car, on a remote lane leading to the long-abandoned Irish village of Kelly’s Forge. But when Detective Finnegan Beck arrives from the nearby town of Cross Beg to investigate he notices there’s a baby’s seat in the back of the car. A bottle of baby’s milk lying in the footwell. And no child. Little Róisín isn’t the first child to go missing from that same remote location though. There was another baby girl, taken more than 50 years before, who was never found.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

Mickey and Mark Moore are ordinary decent criminals - hard men who live by their own code and leaders of a gang that has made millions at the point of a gun. But when Dan 'Spider' Shepherd is sent to infiltrate the tightly knit team of bank robbers, he discovers that he has more in common with them then he first thought. And that perhaps being a career criminal isn't the worst thing in the world.

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust - in ghettos, on death marches, and in concentration camps - a young couple seeks refuge in Canada. They settle into a new life, certain that the terrors of their past are behind them. They build themselves a cozy little cottage on a lake in Muskoka, a cottage that becomes emblematic of their victory over the Nazis. The charming retreat is a safe haven, a refuge from haunted memories. That is, until a single act of unspeakable violence defiles their sanctuary.

After grieving the death of her fiancé and almost losing her job, Agent Sayer Altair is finally starting to rebuild her life. Her research into the minds of psychopaths is breaking new ground, and her strange little family is thriving. But Sayer’s newfound happiness is threatened when she is called in to investigate a girl’s body left inside a circle of animal figurines below a cryptic message written in blood. When they discover that the dead girl is one of 24 missing high school students, Sayer quickly realizes that nothing in this case is what it seems.

When Navy SEALS track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it's obvious there was a traitor on the inside. After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry - former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 - they become targets themselves. Dan 'Spider' Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. But Spider is not used to playing the handler.

In July 1965, teenagers Sylvia and Jenny Likens were left in the temporary care of Gertrude Baniszewski, a middle-aged single mother, and her seven children. The Baniszewski household was overrun with children. There were few rules and ample freedom. Sadly, the environment created a dangerous hierarchy of social Darwinism where the strong preyed on the weak. What transpired in the following three months was both riveting and chilling.

Four-year-old Ellen is snatched by a stranger in the dead of night. Her devastated mother, Nicole, receives four identical phials and a threatening note in a familiar scrawl that chills her to the bone. But she always knew this would happen. She’s been expecting it for years. According to the note, one of the phials is poisoned. Nicole is given a deadly challenge: If she drinks one, the sadistic kidnapper will notify the police of Ellen’s location. The sender claims to be Luka Volkov, but Luka is supposed to be dead, killed long ago in a fire that haunts all those involved.